Sunday Morning...

‘Why aren’t you wearing your church uniform today?’ he asked as he watched her get ready for church.

‘I am not going with you today, I am going somewhere else’, she responded. She was ready for this conversation, she had known all along that it was coming.

She took a deep breath and continued, ‘I am going to see a prophet in Mbare. They say he is a powerful man of God and he can help us’.

‘Help us with what?’

‘Its been three years Robbie’, she paused. ‘Aren’t you tired of me calling you Robbie? Don’t you want me to call you Baba someone?’ She turned away before the first tear fell. She was tired of crying about it and tired of his words of comfort and hope. She needed to take action.

‘Babe, we have been to the doctors, they have said there is no medical problem. In the fulness of time we will concieve and you can call me Baba someone until my ears ring’. He let out a nervous laugh. He didn’t want to have this discussion today. All it ever did was leave them feeling drained.

She wasn’t listening. Her mind was made up and she was going to the prophet in Mbare. Robbie didn’t want to listen to her but she was certain that if the problem was not a medical problem then it was definitely a spiritual one. She had a strong suspicion of who had cast an evil spell on her but how does one tell a man that his mother was evil. She remembered the dream vividly, if at all it was a dream.  It was on her wedding night, his mother dressed in a red dress walked to the foot of her bed, parted her legs and placed five leafs deep within her. She she woke up the next morning, she could still the sensation of the hands that had violated her. When she told Robbie, he had dismissed it as post wedding jitters. When she told her mother, she had said they needed to pray for their marriage. His mother had never liked her.  She wanted her son to marry a Ndebele woman but love knows no tribe; he had fallen in love with and married a Shona woman.

‘Robbie, you can not stop me. It’s either I go alone or you go with me, but I am definitely going. Please allow me to try, for the sake of my sanity’, she picked up her handbag ready to leave.

‘Can you just wait until we visit the doctor in South Africa for a second opinion, please. I don’t know anything else except the church and I don’t want us to venture into these prophet things that we know nothing about. You are right I cannot stop you but I am pleading with you to not go’.

She put her bag down and sank into the floor, warm tears rolling down her face…